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14 October, 2012

Gender Roles

In many of the Aboriginal tribes across Australia, there are
traditional gender roles. Some things are simply designated as men's business,
while others are designated as women's business.

Modern
anthropologists might look back on these groups and find the cultural dynamic
sexist, perhaps the men went out and hunted and the women did work around the
hearth. Modern feminists might be offended by the notion that women were
relegated to certain roles within the community, but men were similarly
relegated to predetermined communal roles.

If you were a man,
you would undertake men's business. If you were a woman, you would undertake
women's business. Men didn't talk about women's business, and women didn't talk
about men's business. Some groups may have had strict taboos, but in most cases
the roles were simply ingrained cultural mores. It wouldn't cross a man's mind
to engage in women's business, it's just not what is done.

In Walkabout, the
spirits derive their strength from universal constants. Some spirits hunt,
others protect; some spirits deal with vast forces on a cosmic scale, others
are far more intimate and personal. Often the most innocuous looking spirit may
be the lynch-pin in events far more dramatic than first appearances might
indicate.

The spirits of the
setting derive from the ancient ways, stretching further back into history than
modern notions of gender equality or equal opportunity. These concepts are a
tiny blip on the radar of recorded history (and recorded history itself is a
tiny blip on the cosmic scale). With this in mind, it makes sense that many
spirits would still be linked to the concepts of men's and women's business.

For less attuned
spirits, this might manifest in the form of a bias or persuasion (a bonus to
deal with characters of one gender, and a penalty when dealing with characters
of the other gender). For spirits closely linked to this concept, one gender
might be completely banned from working with the spirit. A when you consider
that these spirits are intrinsically linked to the concept of gender (rather
than the appearances of clothes and make-up), a male character can't simply put
on drag to deal with a female aligned spirit.

This raised
fascinating questions about gender identity. What do the spirits think of a
male who identifies as a female, or a female who identifies as a male. In
certain Polynesian cultures there is a "third gender", comprising
males who are taught the female duties (and more rarely females who are taught
male duties). In a post-apocalyptic setting, the option for gender reassignment
surgery isn’t really an option, and in the outback you could easily see the
scenes portrayed in the movie “Priscilla: Queen of the Desert”. Being transsexual
in the outback has complications of its own. It’s not a sexist outlook, it’s
just the ways things are. People are too focused on surviving with what they’ve
got to fantasize about the body parts they don’t have. The people from the
glass and steel arcologies and secluded military bunkers of the ancient past
might have the option for gender reassignment, but these people have their own
issues in the outback.

The thoughts here are one of the reasons why I’ve deliberately
included both male and female versions of the character sheet. Some characters
may deem themselves asexual (or a member of a “third gender”), but no character
may consider themselves both male and female. A player deliberately choosing to
play a “third gender” role would find themselves with a reduced penalty against
spirits aligned to both males and females, and would find a penalty dealing
with any society who doesn’t understand the character’s ways (only the “outcastes”
and the “primitives” would be likely to accept them).

Far more easily, a circle of wayfarers would contain both male and
female characters.

The second issue here is the discussion of male and female
business. As a male, I can’t respectfully write about women’s business. Even if
I were a female (or had my wife write the women’s business parts of the book),
I couldn’t include these aspects of gender business because a woman’s business shouldn’t
be read by males, and conversely a man’s business shouldn’t be read by a female.
I’d love to get into specifics to really help define the world, but every tribe
defines men’s and women’s business differently…and the definition of these respective
businesses often goes against their oral traditions. The easy option is to loosely
allude to men’s and women’s business, use the spiritual bonuses and penalties
bring these effects into the game mechanisms, and allow specific groups of
players to define the specifics of gender business.

The problem is that I’ve seen this sort of stuff done so badly in
the past, and I really want to get this right.

Blog Note

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